Expose organization API credit balance to statusLine scripts (and via Admin API)
Summary
Pay-as-you-go API users have no programmatic way to see their remaining credit balance. The statusLine stdin payload includes model and rate_limits.{five_hour,seven_day}.used_percentage, but nothing about the actual money left in the account.
Why this matters
- The 5h / 7d rate-limit bars measure throughput, not money. They tell me nothing about whether my next call will fail with
credit balance is too low. - The console at console.anthropic.com shows the balance, but there is no public API endpoint for it.
GET /v1/organizations/balancereturns 404. - For people topping up credits manually (no auto-recharge), this means jobs can die mid-run with no warning. A statusLine bar would have warned me hours earlier.
- I built a local approximation by parsing
~/.claude/projects/**/*.jsonlusagefields and applying per-token pricing — but that only covers Claude Code traffic, ignores SDK / MCP / direct API traffic, and drifts from reality. The org itself knows the real number.
Proposed solutions (either works)
Option A — statusLine stdin enrichment
Add an optional field to the JSON Claude Code pipes to statusLine commands:
{
\"model\": { ... },
\"rate_limits\": { ... },
\"organization\": {
\"credit_balance_usd\": 27.43,
\"auto_recharge_enabled\": false
}
}
This is the minimum-friction fix — every existing statusLine script can opt in.
Option B — Public Admin API endpoint
Expose GET /v1/organizations/me/balance (or similar) returning current credit balance + auto-recharge state. Then anyone (statusLine, dashboards, CI cost gates) can query it directly with their Admin API key.
Option A is enough for most users; Option B is the more general fix.
Acceptance
- Some way for a script to read \"USD remaining in this account, right now\" without scraping the console.
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